Companies frequently relocate employees from one location to another. Relocations occur for various reasons. For example, newly hired employees living outside a work location must be relocated to the work location. Similarly, existing employees may transfer from one work location to another or, as new work locations are established, existing employees may be transferred to a new work location. Relocations are especially prevalent in the service industries where teams of employees may be called upon to transfer from one work location to another when a new project is started.
The relocation process is a long, tedious, and expensive process that normally occurs over many months and sometimes even years. The relocation process involves the coordination of many different relocation events. For example, a relocation may involve such events as shipping, home selling, lease breakage, house shopping, home buying, and mortgage assistance. Each of these relocation events involves considerable coordination and paperwork.
To further complicate relocations, not all employees are entitled to the same relocation benefits. For example, a senior manager involved in a relocation will generally be authorized to receive more comprehensive relocation benefits as compared to an entry level employee. All of the relocation events and authorized benefits must be carefully tracked throughout the relocation. The relocation events must also be coordinated with accounting and payroll personnel to insure that vendors and employees are properly paid and reimbursed.
Because of the complexity and expense of relocations, large corporations, especially those that routinely relocate personnel, often have separate relocation departments with significant staffs to handle relocation coordination. Each relocation is normally assigned to a relocation coordinator from the relocation department for coordination throughout the relocation. The relocation coordinator is in contact with the relocating employee ("transferee") and the various outside vendors and service providers, such as shipping companies and real estate agents, involved in the relocation.
The relocation process is primarily a manual process with paper records and files maintained throughout the relocation. The complexity and associated large amounts of paperwork involved in a relocation make it very difficult, even for the most organized and diligent relocation coordinator, to stay fully abreast of each assigned relocation. Because of this, additional relocation coordinators are often hired which further increases the company's relocation expenses.
Problems arise when transferees inquire as to the status of their relocation and relocation coordinators must manually search the files to determine the current status of the relocation. If the assigned relocation coordinator is not available and a transferee needs answers now, other relocation coordinators are often unable to expediently answer the transferee's questions, or worse, may give incorrect answers. Relocations are stressful times for the transferee and the inability to get answers is especially troubling during this time of heightened stress.
Relocation coordinators tend to develop their own methods of coordinating and tracking relocations. This non-uniformity makes it very difficult to effectively implement new company relocation policies and procedures. The non-uniformity also increases the likelihood that when a transferee's relocation coordinator is unavailable, other relocation coordinators will be unable to assist the transferee.
Often, a company will purchase the transferee's home and will hire a real estate broker to sell the home. Manual record keeping makes it difficult to track the homes in inventory and to ensure that a home does not stay on the market for an extended period of time resulting in losses to the company. Manual record keeping also makes it difficult to track the performance of real estate brokers, appraisers, and title companies involved in the buying and selling of transferee's homes. This problem is compounded by the fact that these types of records must be maintained for the various possible locations a company may transfer its employees.